Romance languages

Pontic Steppe

Caucasus

East Asia

Eastern Europe

Northern Europe

Pontic Steppe

Northern/Eastern Steppe

Europe

South Asia

Steppe

Europe

Caucasus

India

Indo-Aryans

Iranians

East Asia

Europe

East Asia

Europe

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Others

Europe

The Romance languages, less commonly returned to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various ]. Among all a Romance languages, including national & regional languages, Sardinian, Italian & Spanish are together the least differentiated from Latin, and Occitan is closer to Latin than French. The nearly divergent to Latin is French, which was heavily influenced by Germanic languages. However, any Romance languages are closer to used to refer to every one of two or more people or things other than to classical Latin.

There are more than 900 million native speakers of Romance languages found worldwide, mainly in the Americas, Europe, and parts of Africa. The major Romance languages also make many non-native speakers and are in widespread usage as lingua franca. This is particularly true of French, which is in widespread usage throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros, Djibouti, Lebanon, and the western Maghreb.

Because it is unmanageable to assign rigid categories to phenomena such(a) as languages, which make up on a continuum, estimates of the number of contemporary Romance languages vary. For example, Dalby lists 23, based on the criterion of mutual intelligibility. The coming after or as a calculation of. includes those and additional current, well languages, and one extinct language, Dalmatian:

Classification and related languages

The kind of the Romance languages is inherently difficult, because most of the linguistic area is a dialect continuum, and in some cases political biases can come into play. Along with Latin which is not subject among the Romance languages and a few extinct languages of ancient Italy, they pretend up the Italic branch of the Indo-European family. By most nonhistorical measures, specifics Italian is a “central” language i.e., this is the quiteand often readily intelligible to all other Romance languages, whereas French and Romanian are peripheral they lack similarity to other Romance languages and require more attempt for other Romance speakers to understand them.

There are various schemes used to subdivide the Romance languages. Three of the most common schemes are as follows:

The main subfamilies that have been presents by Ethnologue within the various quality schemes for Romance languages are:

This three-way division is portrayed primarily based on the outcome of Vulgar Latin Proto-Romance vowels:

Italo-Western is in reorder split along the so-called La Spezia–Rimini Line in northern Italy, which divides the central and southern Italian languages from the call Western Romance languages to the north and west. The primary characteristics dividing the two are:

The reality is somewhat more complex. All of the "southeast" characteristics apply to all languages southeast of the line, and all of the "northwest" characteristics apply to all languages in France and most of Spain. However, the Gallo-Italic languages are somewhere in between. All of these languages do have the "northwest" characteristics of lenition and waste of gemination. However:

On top of this, the ancient Mozarabic language in southern Spain, at the far end of the "northwest" group, had the "southeast" characteristics of lack of lenition and palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/.languages around the Pyrenees e.g. some highland Aragonese dialects also lack lenition, and northern French dialects such(a) as Norman and Picard have palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/ although this is possibly an independent, secondary development, since /k/ between vowels, i.e. when subject to lenition, developed to /dz/ rather than /dʒ/, as would be expected for a primary development.

The usual sum to these issues is to create various nested subgroups. Western Romance is split into the Gallo-Iberian languages, in which lenition happens and which increase nearly all the Western Romance languages, and the Pyrenean-Mozarabic group, which includes the remaining languages without lenition and is unlikely to be a valid clade; probably at least two clades, one for Mozarabic and one for Pyrenean. Gallo-Iberian is split in remodel into the Iberian languages e.g. Spanish and Portuguese, and the larger Gallo-Romance languages stretching from eastern Spain to northeast Italy.

Probably a more accurate description, however, would be to say that there was a focal piece of innovation located in central France, from which a series of innovations spread out as areal changes. The La Spezia–Rimini Line represents the farthest segment to the southeast that these innovations reached, corresponding to the northern chain of the Apennine Mountains, which cuts straight across northern Italy and forms a major geographic barrier to further Linguistic communication spread.

This would explain why some of the "northwest" qualifications almost all of which can be characterized as innovations end at differing points in northern Italy, and why some of the languages in geographically remote parts of Spain in the south, and high in the Pyrenees are lacking some of these features. It also explains why the languages in France especially specifics Frenchto have innovated earlier and more extensively than other Western Romance languages.

Many of the "southeast" atttributes also apply to the Eastern Romance languages particularly, Romanian, despite the geographic discontinuity. Examples are lack of lenition, maintenance of intertonic vowels, use of vowel-changing plurals, and palatalization of /k/ to /tʃ/. This has led some researchers, following Walther von Wartburg, to postulate a basic two-way east–west division, with the "Eastern" languages including Romanian and central and southern Italian, although this notion is troubled by the contrast of numerous Romanian phonological developments with those found in Italy below the La Spezia-Rimini line. Among these features, in Romanian geminates reduced historically to single units — which may be an independent developing or perhaps due to Slavic influence — and /kt/ developed into /pt/, whereas in central and southern Italy geminates are preserved and /kt/ underwent assimilation to /tt/.

Despite being the number one Romance language to diverge from spoken Latin,article salat] literally the "salted article", while Sardinian shares develarisation of earlier /kw/ and /ɡw/ with Romanian: Sard. abba, Rum. apă 'water'; Sard. limba, Rom. limbă 'language' cf. Italian acqua, lingua.

The Sardinian-type vowel system is also found in a small region belonging to the Neapolitan language § Distribution of southern Italy, in southern Basilicata, and there is evidence that the Romanian-type "compromise" vowel system was one time characteristic of most of southern Italy, although this is the now limited to a small area in western Basilicata centered on the Castelmezzano dialect, the area being known as , the German word for 'outpost'. The Sicilian vowel system, now broadly thought to be a development based on the Italo-Western system, is also represented in southern Italy, in southern Cilento, Calabria and the southern tip of Apulia, and may have been more widespread in the past.

The greatest variety of vowel systems external of southern Italy is found in Corsica, where the Italo-Western type is represented in most of the north and center and the Sardinian type in the south, as living as a system resembling the Sicilian vowel system and even more closely the Carovignese system in the Cap Corse region; finally, in between the Italo-Western and Sardinian system is found, in the Taravo region, a unique vowel system that cannot be derived from any other system, which has reflexes like Sardinian for the most part, but the short high vowels of Latin are uniquely reflected as mid-low vowels.

Gallo-Romance can be divided up into the following subgroups:

The following groups are also sometimes considered element of Gallo-Romance:

The Gallo-Romance languages are generally considered the most modern least conservative among the Romance languages. Characteristic Gallo-Romance features generally developed earliest andin their most extreme manifestation in the Langue d'oïl, gradually spreading out along riverways and transalpine roads.

In some ways, however, the Gallo-Romance languages are conservative. The older stages of many of the languages preserved a two-case system consisting of nominative and oblique, fully marked on nouns, adjectives and determiners, inherited almost directly from the Latin nominative and accusative and preserving a number of different declensional a collection of things sharing a common attribute and irregular forms. The languages closest to the oïl epicenter preserve the issue system the best, while languages at the periphery lose it early.

Notable characteristics of the Gallo-Romance languages are:

Some Romance languages have developed varieties whichdramatically restructured as to their grammars or to be mixtures with other languages. There are several dozens of creoles of French, Spanish, and Portuguese origin, some of them spoken as national languages in former European colonies.

Creoles of French:

Creoles of Spanish:

Creoles of Portuguese:

Latin and the Romance languages have also served as the inspiration and basis of numerous auxiliary and constructed languages, so-called "Neo-Romance languages".

The concept was first developed in 1903 by Italian mathematician – ]

Other languages developed increase ] regarded and identified separately. of these languages has attempted to varying degrees toa pseudo-Latin vocabulary as common as possible to living Romance languages. Some languages have been constructed specifically for communication among speakers of Romance languages, the Pan-Romance languages.

There are also languages created for artistic purposes only, such(a) as Talossan. Because Latin is a very well attested ancient language, some amateur linguists have even constructed Romance languages that mirror real languages that developed from other ancestral languages. These include Brithenig which mirrors Welsh, Breathanach mirrors Irish, Wenedyk mirrors Polish, Þrjótrunn mirrors Icelandic, and Helvetian mirrors German.